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Comment Re:Why Aliens (Score 1) 69

I agree that some of these things---the ones that aren't explicable as searchlight beams reflecting off of clouds, or Venus, or balloons--- are not physical objects. My favorite idea is that someone (China, say) has lined up a bunch of tiny drones with radar transponders. When the first one in the line detects a radar ping from some American fighter, its transponder sends out a response that makes it look like a sizable object (whereas the drone itself is too small to show up on radar). Simultaneously it sends a signal to the next drone in the line, which does the same with some delay. Depending on the delay, the line of drones can appear to be a single object moving quickly or slowly. And if the line is bent, the virtual object can appear to take a sudden turn, or go into the water or come out of the water.

Optical illusions could be created in much the same way.

Comment Moon (Score 1) 31

"Correct sun and moon icons during midnight sun — Fixed an icon that wrongly showed a moon during all-day daylight in polar regions... "
Huh? The Moon comes up in day time just like it does at night (with the possible exception of the full Moon, which rises about the same time the Sun sets, and sets about the same time the Sun rises). And if you look in the right place, you can see the Moon perfectly well in the daytime (assuming no clouds in the way).

Comment It's not JUST the Ribbon that's wrong (Score 1) 235

There are a lot of people here posting that the Ribbon is a bad design, and I agree with them 110%. But that's not the only thing that's wrong with Word: it also distributes controls all around the edges, and unless you use it day in and day out, and use those distributed controls, it's a pain finding them.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice has copied this bad UI from Microsoft. I'm looking at LO Writer now, and in addition to the menu at the top, there's a sidebar on the right with eight or ten indecipherable icons (one of which looks like a hamburger menu, except it isn't). There's a Find box near the bottom with its controls. And on the status bar, there's a zoom (I think) gizmo on the right, something that looks like pages with folded-over corners next to that, a few more boxes or something, a page style chooser(?), and an image of a 3 1/2" floppy diskette on the left. I think I can get rid of all this cruft, but why is it there in the first place? I certainly don't use most of those things very often (except search, for which ^F works fine, thank you!), and they just waste space.

Comment Re:Ribbon, No. (Score 4, Insightful) 235

The traditional menu *could* be made context sensitive. So that's missing the point. The point (for me, and I think for a lot of other ribbon-haters) is that icons are mostly indecipherable, you have to look at the text label (or worse, mouse-over) to know what they do. Whereas we all understand words. (If we didn't, we wouldn't be using *Word*.)

Comment Re:Context Matters (Score 5, Insightful) 235

Egypt gave up hieroglyphics after the mostly alphabetic Hieratic (and later Demotic) writing system came into use. Two millennia later, it took the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
We grew up with an alphabetic writing system, why on earth would Microsoft want to replace that with indecipherable icons?

Comment Re:Heating Earth is Not Enviromentally Friendly (Score 1) 58

There was an article in Washington Post a few weeks ago about the cost or running lights in a room when you're gone. The article said it was no more than a couple pennies per day, and the calculations work out.

Of course there soon won't be any pennies (in the US), and I turn off the lights anyway.

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